Some days, it’s hard to keep up with Brian Blade. The Louisiana-raised drummer has played with just about everybody in jazz, and has lengthy collaborations with musicians ranging from alto saxophonist and producer David Binney and multi-platinum rock producer Daniel Lanois to Wolfgang Muthspiel and tenor giant Joshua Redman. These days, Blade can frequently found powering the astral-aspiring mad genius of the Wayne Shorter Quartet.

Blade also leads his own group, the Fellowship, the core of which has played together consistently for the last twenty years. The Fellowship’s music reflects Blade’s often undisclosed studious, spiritual nature. This jazz is not hot, bopped and swung in night clubs; it is deliberately debated, evolving as if through legislation, reflecting a unanimous, almost uniform, group compositional and improvisational consensus on the direction of the music. Drop the needle of any of the Fellowship’s records and you’ll find yourself in the same deep, reflective tonal conversations, even 20 years on.

Comments

comments

About Jackson Sinnenberg

Jackson is an Associate Producer for the POTUS Channel on SiriusXM . His work has appeared in the Washington City Paper, on NPR Music, NPR global culture blog Goats & Soda, in On Tap Magazine, The Rotation, and the blog of Smithsonian Folkways Records. He previously covered the city’s music scene for WGTB, Georgetown University’s radio station, where he was a show host, writer, and columnist until his graduation. He graduated from Georgetown with a bachelor’s degree in American Musical Culture.

About Us

CapitalBop, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving, promoting and presenting jazz in Washington, D.C. We build audiences in order to build community around this music, because it is important to the city's historic identity but also ever-changing and contemporary. CapitalBop.com is designed to help everyone from newcomers to jazz die-hards find live music that will fit their preferences. Our D.C. Jazz Lofts and other shows reach diverse audiences and present jazz in nontraditional, outside-the-box scenarios.